Thursday, February 21, 2013

Varieties of Religious Indifference

Here we address no matters of faith, but merely clarify the
philosophical terminology.This is
not theology;this is
lexicography.

Theism:Behind or beyond or standing over
the real world (both visible and invisible), there stands a larger pattern, one
facet of which we could recognize as a consciousness.

If nothing is added to this minimal stipulation --
especially, if any such additions are denied -- such theism is known as Deism.As more is added, you get the Abrahamic faiths.(The distinction between Deism and full
Theism is important to, say, Christianity, but not to philosophy as such.)

Atheism:the denial of this.

Distinguished from this last, by those who are careful with
words, is:

Agnosticism:a wait-and-see stance.

These are the traditional termini;yet, for the modern panoply of unbelief, more terms are
needs;which, as a licensced
wordsmith, we duly coin.

Ayer insisted that he was not an
atheist, because an atheist denies the existence of God, which of course Ayer
claimed was just as meaningless as
asserting the existence of God.

This (philosophically sophomoric) position we may dub Ontological A-Theism, or (in a snappy
stylesuitable for headlines) Ayerism.

And here, you may aver, our spade is turned;the bottom of the barrel has been
sounded.

But alas:there
exists a sub-level, even below this -- lower than the paltering of Ayerism
(which was fashionably in line with dismissing centuries or rather millennia of
human enquiry as philosophically “meaningless”), there is the kind of mind that
does not even realize that there is anything to be asserted or denied or
artfully dodged.Traditional terms
for this are Indifferentism or Adiaphorism (which latter word will
set you back a fittybone).But for
a more contemporaneously accessible designation, we might dub this WalMartism:the attitude of those whose inquisitive
spiritrises no higherthan to wonder what is on sale at the
Mall.

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About the Author

David Justice studied French at the Sorbonne, mathematics and physics at Harvard and MIT, and math and linguistics at Berkeley.He is the author of The Semantics of Form in Arabic, in the Mirror of European Languages; and of the fictional worksI Don’t Do Divorce Cases (which includes stories originally published in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine) and Murphy on the Mount. He taught French at Berkeley, and linguistics at the University of Alberta, then worked at Merriam-Webster as Editor of Etymology (where he edited Webster’s Book of Word Histories) and as Editor of Pronunciation.He subsequently was editor-in-chief at Franklin Electronic Publishers.He is currently employed as a language analyst, and consultant for the University of Maryland. He lives with his bride of forty years, overlooking a peaceful lake.